James M. Burke

So, over the last few days, I’ve had some issues with my convertible notebook.  I’m not going to go into details other than I believe I have a bad hard disk…but in the troubleshooting process, I discovered a very cool utility called the “Virtual Floppy Drive.”  Today, you will have a very difficult time finding a computer (notebook, really) that has an internal floppy…unless you specifically ordered it that way.  Well, good news - the Virtual Floppy Drive will emulate any type of floppy media and create the appropriate drive A or drive B.  It also has the ability to mount a floppy image.  This is nice when you have that driver that requires a blank formatted floppy disk - simply load up the app, tell it to mount drive A as a 1.44mb floppy drive and away you go.  I used it and then copied the contents of the new A drive to my USB drive.  This is a great utility!

Download: Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1

I work in a group here at NetApp which will soon be responsible for the development of the VMware SAN Host Attach Kit. In related news today for VMware, the EMC subsidiary is expected to announce next week that VMware GSX will be free. Currently, the software runs $1,400 for a dual-processor server. Here’s part of the CNET News.com article:

VMware, an EMC subsidiary whose software lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer, is expected to announce next week that it will begin giving away one of its key products for free, CNET News.com has learned.

The company sells three core products, VMware Workstation, GSX Server and ESX Server, but competition is on the horizon in a market VMware once had to itself. On Monday, however, the company is expected to announce it will give away GSX for free, sources familiar with the plan said.

GSX runs on a “host” Windows or Linux operating system and then lets “guest” operating systems run atop it in compartments called virtual machines. The higher-end ESX product, in contrast, needs no host and runs below the operating system layer.

View: VMware to make server product free | CNET News.com
View: Neowin.net - VMware to Make Server Product Free

I learned something interesting today.  If you have ever wondered what the uptime is of your Windows machine, simply drop to a command prompt and enter the following:

net statistics server | more

-or-

net statistics workstation | more

You’ll see a line that says “Statistics since .”   This is quite accurate - the alternative I’ve always used prior to this was downloading the Windows NT: Uptime.exe utility.  The utility, provided by Microsoft, says that it’s only supported on Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 2000.  But, it does in fact work on Windows XP, and I suspect it’ll work on Windows 2003.

Download:  Windows NT: Uptime.exe utility

It is truly amazing how much technology advances every day.  For instance, check out this picture from a 1954 Popular Mechanics magazine:

You can click on the image to make it larger, but the picture says:

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look like in the year 2004.  However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home.  Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented techology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems.  With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

I laugh every time I hear that last line.

This morning, I had an e-mail in my inbox that was sent to an internal Mac distribution list that I subscribe to.  In this e-mail, the person included the following link:  YouTube - iMac G5 vs iMac Intel Boot.  It compares side-to-side the iMac G5 and the iMac Intel Core Duo’s boot time.  The one on the left is the iMac with the Intel Core Duo processor, whereas the one on the right is the previous G5 model.  I think the test is invalid.  The iMac G5 ends up booting almost 1 MINUTE after the Intel Core Duo.  Something is different between the two, other than the processor.  If you read some of the comments, there are various people saying that the G5 had a COLD boot whereas the Intel had a warm boot.  Others say that the G5 had some disk problems and had to run fsck whereas the Intel didn’t.  Either way, it doesn’t appear to be a good comparison…they say that the Intel Core Duo is up to 4X faster, but one minute faster on boot seems too good to be true.

Steve Jobs also announced that both Intel and Apple are ready to begin shipping the Intel powered Macs. They begin taking orders today. One thing that caught my attention was that the PowerBook has been redesigned and renamed to the MacBook Pro. It includes a built-in iSight, the Intel Core Duo processor (2 processors in 1) with speeds up to 4X faster, and a magnetic power adapter cleverly named MagSafe. The price tag is a little steep at $1999, but as always with Apple, the quality of the product won’t let you down. They begin shipping in February.

View: Apple - MacBook Pro

Today, at the MacWorld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Mac OS X 10.4.4 would be released today. I will post more here when the download becomes available.

In the meantime, check out Engadget’s coverage of his keynote: Steve Jobs keynote live from Macworld 2006.

Update: It appears as if Quicktime 7.0.4 and iTunes 6.0.2 were also released today.

The 10.4.4 Update delivers overall improved reliability and compatibility for Mac OS X v10.4 and is recommended for all users.

It includes fixes for:
- SMB/CIFS and NFS network file services
- Bluetooth wireless access
- Core Graphics, Core Audio, Core Image, RAW camera support, including updated ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers
- Spotlight indexing and searching
- AppleScript, iChat, DVD Player, and Safari applications
- Dashboard widgets: Calendar and Stocks
- Software Update and Sync Services
- compatibility with USB and FireWire devices and third party applications
- previous standalone security updates

Download

Apple on Tuesday released a 1.5 MB “Bluetooth Firmware Update for Mac OS X 10.4.3.” Apple’s page reports that the update (1.2) “improves Bluetooth performance and reliability issues.” At the time of this posting, the update is not available via Software Update.

The Bluetooth Firmware Updater supports D-Link USB Adapters and Apple internal Bluetooth modules for: iMac G4, 12″ and 15″ Powerbook, iMac G5, and Mac Mini.

Sources: AppleInsider | Apple released Bluetooth Firmware Update, Bluetooth Firmware Update for Mac OS X 10.4.3 - Apple

UPDATE: Odd, the updater told me that an update is not needed for my computer.  Checking in Applications\Utilities\Bluetooth Firmware Updater, I found that I already had v1.2.0 (1.2.0f6).

This is a little old, but I was out of town, so here is the “news flash.” Last week, Mozilla released a much anticipated Firefox 1.5. Here is an exerpt of the new features (taken from the Release Notes):

• Automated update to streamline product upgrades. Notification of an update is more prominent, and updates to Firefox may now be half a megabyte or smaller. Updating extensions has also improved.
• Faster browser navigation with improvements to back and forward button performance.
• Drag and drop reordering for browser tabs.
• Improvements to popup blocking.
• Clear Private Data feature provides an easy way to quickly remove personal data through a menu item or keyboard shortcut.
• Answers.com is added to the search engine list.
• Improvements to product usability including descriptive error pages, redesigned options menu, RSS discovery, and “Safe Mode” experience.
• Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.
• Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.
• Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.
• New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.
• Many security enhancements.

Get your copy at www.getfirefox.com.

When I got back to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, I clicked through the various RSS feeds I subscribe to via SharpReader.  I found one to be very interesting; Ed Brill posted “mail client hatred stats.”  For those of you who don’t know, Ed Brill is an IBMer working with Worldwide Lotus Messaging Sales.  Anyway, in this post, Ed googled for the strings “I hate Notes” and “I hate Outlook” and compared the number of hits between the two.  The outcome was that “I hate Outlook” returned almost 7 times more results than “I hate Notes.”  Well, this is obviously not a fair comparison.  The obvious reason being Notes and Outlook can mean more than just the software package.  The second being that more people use Outlook than Notes (my own estimate).  I wasn’t able to find a credible source with the estimated number of installations. 

No offense to Ed or any other of my IBM friends, but I hate Notes!  :)  Lotus Notes, that is.  Maybe it’s because Outlook is what I’m used to, but when I worked at IBM, I hated every minute of working with Notes.  The interface is just very odd to me.  If you don’t use the local replica, then if for some reason the server isn’t responding, your client will completely lock up.  And, when it locks up, you can’t just kill Notes.exe, you have to find some application to kill all of the child processes…  My fix was to just create the local replica…but then I wonder….Why isn’t that the default?  Why should I have to go figure out how to do all of these things?  For me, Outlook is very intuitive…sure there are some things that are difficult to find…but try using Notes for the first time.  It’s a huge shock.  Really, arguing this is pointless…Notes fans will continue to use Notes, and Outlook fans will continue to use Outlook.  It’s really a preference thing…and I obviously prefer Microsoft Outlook.